Bridging the Unbridgeable

Rereading Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) this summer reminded me of one of the last BA theses I supervised before I retired nearly three years ago. The student writing the thesis was analysing twitter messages, and told me he was hoping to come across tryna in his data. Tryna? He said it was a common form on social media platforms, meaning “trying to”. It was all new to me.

Not so as it happens, for I actually would have come across it when I first read The Catcher in the Rye some time during the mid-1970s, only at the time it probably didn’t strike me as a form worth noticing. Nor did it when I reread the novel ten years later for a paper I wrote for a retiring colleague’s Festschrift. I’ve reproduced the paper elsewhere on this blog.

Third time lucky, it seems: tryna I now noticed occurring several times in the novel, as on p. 50 of my Penguin copy: “I was tryna sleep before you guys started making all that noise.” This is not the main character, Holden Caulfield, speaking, but his roommate. Another instance in the novel is highlighted by Jane Hodson in her book Dialect in Film & Literature (2014: 100), where she comments on the sociolinguistic contrast between Holden’s use of trying to and the pimp’s response: “Nobody’s tryna chisel nobody.” So in writing, even though it reflects fictional speech, the word is at least some 75 years old. But it has no entry in the OED. Should it have? I’m interested to hear what readers of this blog think.

Doing a Google Ngram check confirms that the word was in (written) use already during the 1950s, with an interesting bleep at the time for British English. Could this have been a Catcher-in-the-Rye effect? The graph also shows a steep rise for British English since the 2000s (top), but a decline for American English setting in about ten years ago (bottom). What is going on here, I wonder? Any thoughts?